One kidney, two lives

For 32-year-old Joanne Del Rio of New Bedford, what should have been a difficult decision was a no-brainer: giving up one of her healthy kidneys to save the life of her mother-in-law.

Don Hammontree

For 32-year-old Joanne Del Rio of New Bedford, what should have been a difficult decision was a no-brainer: giving up one of her healthy kidneys to save the life of her mother-in-law, who had been suffering on dialysis for over three years.

But it wasn't only one life she saved.

On October 6, Del Rio traveled to Waltham to meet 67-year-old retired schoolteacher LeRoy Ehmling, who received the kidney Joanne donated via the New England Kidney Exchange Program (NEPKE) back in May 2011. more than a year after the surgery.

The program takes a willing donor who is incompatible with a loved one in need and matches them with someone else on a waiting list — and when a kidney comes available to help the loved one, it is transplanted as soon as a matching donor is found.

"I have no regrets — if I had more kidneys, I'd do it again," Del Rio said.

Del Rio and Ehmling exchanged letters for several months after the transplant, but had never met face-to-face. Del Rio, a mother of three, admitted to being initially nervous about the meeting, which has held at the New England Organ Bank's office in Waltham.

"I went into it without having any big expectations, which I was told is the right way to approach it," she recalls. "I was looking for a sense of closure by seeing how he was doing and realizing that I'd actually done something to impact someone's life, I'd given someone a second chance."

For Ehmling, it was a chance to express what he calls his "extreme gratitude."

"It was quite emotional for me," he says. "Joanne's just an amazing person. The idea that someone had donated their kidney without even knowing me was incredible, and my motivation for meeting her was to express how truly thankful I am. I feel so blessed at what's come to pass."

Del Rio, too, was moved.

"We both hugged and cried," she said. "He had such a remarkable story — he'd been on dialysis for seven years, he had to lose 150 pounds to be on the donation list, and now his life has completely changed for the better."

Not only is Del Rio's kidney functioning properly, according to recent medical tests it actually functions well enough to match the work of two of the organs.

Del Rio's beloved mother-in-law Isabel is also thriving with her new kidney.

Joanne was originally moved to action to aid Isabel, 63, who first started suffering kidney problems eight years ago, and underwent dialysis treatments for three-and-a-half years while awaiting a possible transplant match.

"It was a very uncomfortable process," says the Puerto Rican native, through translation provided by her daughter-in-law. "It was painful, I lost a lot of weight, I had to wake up early in the morning at 7 a.m. every other day and sit through the process for three-and-a-half hours."

Joanne said family members were ready to assist from the get-go, but biology got in the way.

"There were a number of us in the family who wanted to donate to her, but we were actually all denied because we weren't compatible," says Joanne. "We went through all the tests — which can take some time — one by one until we finally ran out of family members."

Knowing it could take up to five years for Isabel to find a match through traditional donor routes, Joanne's interest was piqued when she heard about NEPKE's paired kidney exchange program.

She stepped forward, despite reservations some of her friends voiced about the process.

"Some people were asking me, 'why are you doing this? You're young, you have kids, you're jeopardizing your own health and your future,'" she says. "My attitude was, 'if it's meant to be, it will happen, and everything will be fine.'"

Once she'd committed to the program, a match was found for Isabel in April 2011, donated by a 23-year-old male donor who prefers to remain anonymous, says Joanne.

"I was so happy, I didn't think we'd find a match so fast," says Isabel. "But I had faith that everything was going to be all right."

Not long afterward, Ehmling was found to be a match for Joanne's kidney, and it was her turn for surgery, scheduled right after Mother's Day. The only glitch was that the venue for the operation was changed at the last minute from Tufts Medical Center in Boston to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital in Lebanon, N.H., due to a nurses' strike.

"That was a bit tough for me, because I'd met all the surgeons at Tufts who'd be in on the operation, and suddenly I ended up having to take a three-and-a-half-hour drive up north to a hospital there," she says. "So I was in the hands of total strangers."

But that didn't make Joanne waver in her decision.

"Even as they were wheeling me into the operating room, they were telling me, 'Uou don't have to do this if you're not comfortable, there's no pressure,'" she says. "But I couldn't back out. I would've felt like I was failing not only the person who was going to get my kidney, but my mother-in-law as well. I wouldn't have wanted someone to back out on me."

Unfortunately, the NEPKE program, which had provided donors for 30 transplants a year, was phased out later in 2011 due to a lack of funding, says Ruthanne Leishman Hanto, the program's former manager. NEPKE's mission, however, has been transitioned to that of its national parent organization, the Virginia-based United Network for Organ Sharing. For more information, click on to UNOS' Web site, www.unos.org

Other than some minor diverticulitis complications that affected her following the transplant, the surgery was a success, and months after the operation, Del Rio is feeling fine, and she and Ehmling have agreed to stay in contact with one another.

"My life continues pretty much the way it always has," she says. "I know there's things I need to watch now since I only have one kidney, but I maintain a pretty healthy lifestyle. I feel normal; sometimes it's easy for me to forget what I did."

What gives her the most satisfaction is seeing Isabel thrive, freed from her dialysis treatments.

"Isabel's so much more than a mother-in-law to me — she's my best friend, my counselor, she's been through thick and thin for me, and not just because I'm married to her son," Joanne says. "She's a wonderful person, and when I think of all she's done for me, helping her the way I did seemed like the least I could do."